REPORT
FROM THE WAR ZONE: Yugoslavs
resolute as bombs fall everywhere

May 18, 1999--Tonight
at 11:30 p.m. two huge detonations destroyed Yugopetrol's last remaining
fuel-storage facility in Belgrade, a little over a mile from our hotel.

We raced to the scene
through darkened streets to witness with our own eyes the latest crime of
U.S. and NATO forces. The truth is inescapable: this war of aggression on
Yugoslavia is a war against the people.

Today at the Clinical
Center of Serbia, we witnessed patients with truly horrifying injuries.
Dr. Vladimir Yucic was about to leave for the heavily bombed city of Nis
to perform emergency surgery on injured patients there. He told us, "I
am a specialist in liver surgery. This hospital was about to introduce liver
transplants. Instead I'm doing amputations on people wounded by bombs."

Dr. Sonja Pavlovic
works in intensive care. She took us to meet Nada, a 15-year-old girl whose
legs had been mangled by a cluster bomb. The child's family is Serbian and
lives in Kosovo. Because of the relentless bombing there, they sent her
by bus to relatives in Montenegro. The bus was hit by a NATO cluster bomb.
She is now paralyzed from the waist down, with shrapnel throughout her body.

NATO bombers have a
diabolical practice: they drop a second missile minutes after the first,
just as rescue teams arrive.

We spoke with two men
from civil defense who had gone to rescue workers in the army headquarters
in downtown Belgrade. As their vehicle approached the damaged building,
a second bomb hit. One of the men whispered in great pain that a co-worker
had died when they were blown into the air. He said he knew "in a millisecond"
that his own legs had been blown off.

The other patient,
Nebojsa Starcevic, has had reconstructive surgery that doctors hope will
save his leg.

These two people were
courageous not only in their struggle to survive, but in telling us their
story and reliving the horror. Belgrade's top official for civil defense
was also a patient in the ICU unit.

Dr. Pavlovic said,
"These men are truly our heroes because they know of the second bombs
and still rush to the scene to recover the wounded and dead."

During the day, people
fill the streets of Belgrade and other cities, shopping, going to work.
Life seems normal. But when the air-raid sirens go off, their lives can
be turned upside down in an instant.

This afternoon at 3
p.m. we stood on a balcony in downtown Belgrade, about to head out to a
refugee camp at Rakovica, a suburb 15 minutes away that had recently been

bombed. Suddenly the
sirens sounded. Within minutes came an announcement that bombs were dropping
once again on Rakovica.

Yugoslavia has no high-tech
weapons that could possibly take on the Pentagon. So what are NATO's targets?

In 50 days of bombing,
NATO's goal has been to break the Yugoslav people's resistance to an army
of foreign occupation--the main demand presented by the U.S. at Rambouillet
before the bombing began.

The list of NATO military
targets includes schools, hospitals, heating plants, communication grids,
fertilizer plants to undermine this rich agricultural country, television
and radio stations, cultural and religious sites, bus and train stations,
and housing units on busy downtown streets.

All government and
municipal services, fuel supplies and bridges have been targeted.

To drive from Budapest,
Hungary, to Belgrade we had to take back roads. All the main highways, including
bridges and overpasses, had been bombed and were impassable.

The countryside is
intensely green. Fields have just been planted and new plants peek up in
neat rows.

Between Novi Sad and
Belgrade, we came on a small gas station still smoldering, flames licking
pools of oil. Four laser-guided bombs had hit it just hours before. Gas
fumes hung heavily in the air. Two gas pumps plus a small kiosk that sold
coffee, crackers and plastic quarts of oil were now melted rubble. Several
fuel storage tanks had been twisted into grotesque shapes.

A small house across
the way had only two walls left and no roof. A haggard man--the gas station
attendant--described how he heard the first bomb hit and fled into the fields.
He said, "In one minute, I lost my home, everything I had, and my livelihood."

Local people stood
around, looking at the smoking ruins.

Novi Sad was our first
stop inside Yugoslavia. Three fine bridges once spanned the Danube River
there. The oldest was used by local people in the downtown area. There was
a railroad bridge and, further upstream, a new six-lane span for a major
highway.

All three bridges have
been bombed and now block the Danube, the major waterway of Europe. Some
150 vessels from Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Romania are stranded at
the Yugoslav border. Altogether, 35 major bridges in Yugoslavia have been
destroyed or damaged.

The largest and most
advanced cardiovascular institute in the Balkans must now be reached by
a gerry-rigged ferry boat. A large floating platform or raft with three
engines at the stern, it is able to carry several hundred people at a time.
Several other smaller ferries and boats shuttle back and forth, trying to
make up for the loss of the bridges.

Our hotel in Novi Sad
had only cold water. The thermal plant that had provided heat and hot water
for the whole city had been bombed. This is an inconvenience in May. It
will be life-threatening next January.

The people are
calm

Before nightfall, we
visited a bombed school. A huge crater devoured what was once the schoolyard.
All the windows were gone and the walls were charred.

Yet, after two months
of bombing, we found people surprisingly calm even when night falls and
the air-raid sirens wail. Conversation continues. People move quietly to
the shelters.

The first day in Belgrade
we spent touring bombed rubble, from small houses on side streets to the
huge thermal plant that provided heat and hot water to all New Belgrade,
a modern development of 80,000 new apartments. Now its 350,000 people are
without heat or hot water.

The neonatal hospital
in downtown Belgrade was a step into a seemingly secure world. Premature
and critically ill newborns from all over Yugoslavia are sent here. Some
180 tiny, fragile infants cling to life in incubators and on mechanical
ventilators. If the electricity is cut even for a few minutes, many lives
will be lost. But backup generators stand by.

Bombings just two blocks
away, however, have already rattled and disrupted these sensitively calibrated
mechanisms several times.

We met with six doctors.
All, including the director of the hospital, were women. All health care
in Yugoslavia is free, as is medical school. Since the bombing started,
hospital emergency rooms have quadrupled their beds and material.

Defense is well
organized

The initial bombings
targeted government buildings, but all government ministries had already
been moved and evacuated weeks before. Many valuable or life-sustaining
supplies have been dispersed widely around the country. Air-raid shelters
are well-stocked and marked. Even little children can recite air-raid warning
procedures.

Hundreds of thousands
of people have been on the move for several years, as Yugoslavia was being
dismembered under the pressures of Western imperialism. With many refugees
from the Krajina in Croatia, from Bosnia, and now from Kosovo, housing is
packed.

Before the bombing,
big apartment blocks were going up everywhere. The cranes can still be seen
on the skyline. But all work has now been halted.

Even before the latest
bombings--the heaviest of the war--half a million jobs had been lost as
plants and infrastructure were destroyed. However, the government continues
to issue paychecks so no one starves.

We visited Nis, one
of the most heavily bombed cities in southern Serbia, just north of the
province of Kosovo. The bridge we took coming into the city was blown up
just a half hour after we passed over it. We had to take a different route
on our return to Belgrade.

Nis is a city of 250,000.
We saw destruction to a flour mill, a bus station, and to many little houses
all along the road. Huge gasoline holding tanks that provided heating and
cooking fuel for 800,000 people in the entire region were destroyed.

In one of the worst
crimes, the central market of Nis was hit at noon on May 7. Eleven people
were killed and scores injured. A hospital with a red cross clearly marked
on the roof was hit with cluster bombs. In one area of a few blocks, 1,300
bomblets were dropped.

Cluster and fragmentation
bombs are anti-personnel weapons banned by all international conventions.
One bomb full of razor-sharp ribbons of steel can shred an area the size
of a football field.

On grassy lawns and
pathways, unexploded cluster bombs are marked with bright ribbons and signs
so people will avoid stepping on them.

Also bombed was the
Greek consulate. As with China, there is tremendous popular sentiment for
Yugoslavia in Greece.

At the Nis tobacco
factory, a worker named Miloye told us, "Planes are constantly flying
overhead but we come to work every day." Asked if he was afraid, he
said, "Of course, but we must work because without work there is no
life." The factory employs 3,000 workers and has been bombed on three
separate occasions.

Miloye spoke about
his eight-month-old daughter. "I wonder what her future will be. I
hope this will be over so when she grows up to be a woman she can't even
remember it."

La Riva and Flounders
went to Yugoslavia May 14 with an International Action Center delegation
headed by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. They were accompanied
by Pacifica radio news reporter Jeremy Scahill. La Riva, who also visited
Belgrade with Clark in the first week of the bombing, is making a video,
"NATO Targets." Flounders is an editor and co-author of the book
"NATO in the Balkans." Scahill will be filing twice-daily reports
from Yugoslavia to over 200 U.S. radio stations.